Now, Heinzerling had begun to take a keener interest in peace. He was entering upon his fifth decade of life and his little Karl was nearly ten and clamoring to be a soldier—a soldier, yet, with a company of horse manned for the moment almost entirely by Scots Protestants whose current commander Lennox had had the lights punched out of him only six months before in a barroom brawl. By one Gus Heinzerling, SJ. (Only temporarily punched out, alas. The surly Calvinist had regained his senses and his feet and acquitted himself thereafter better than Heinzerling liked to admit.)
Giving the “paper” practical effect was like being back at school, though. Gus had staggered out of the collegium at Köln with his head crammed full of logic and rhetoric and the rest of the trivium and quadrivium and fit to be a faithful soldier of Christ. And now he was having to go through it all again on this latest project of Father Mazzare’s.
They had the garden furniture out behind the rectory in the fresh autumn air. Fortunately, yesterday’s rains had been replaced by sunshine. Karl, Aloysius and Matthias were getting the barbecue alight in the intense and scientific manner of small boys allowed to play with fire. Hannelore, to his constant pleasure lately become the Frau Heinzerling, was keeping one eye on the boys and the other on her knitting as she chatted with the Reverend Mary Ellen Jones. The Reverend Simon’s wife was a minister in her own right and quite the most bizarre thing or person in Grantville as far as Augustus Heinzerling, SJ, was concerned. He kept watching his own wife for signs of getting ideas in that direction and was ready to put his foot down for the first time since he had married Hanni.
The table was spread, for the moment, with books and papers and scribbled notes. Father Mazzare had received a letter from Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger asking—asking, mind—for an appreciation of the three hundred years of history, so far as Grantville had the books to give it, that had led to the doctrines and dogma that was in the bundle of books lately sent to Rome by the kind agency of the good Monsignor Mazarini.
It had been easy enough for Heinzerling; the cardinal gave an order, he jumped to it. For Mazzare, it had been more complicated. The first thing he had pointed out was the hedge of ifs and buts and pleases, not an imperative mood in the whole thing. And that glaring subjunctive in it, inviting a caveat wide enough to ride a squadron of lies through, should Mazzare find it so convenient. Someone was setting a subtler test than Father Mazzare’s research and reporting skills. His obedience was on trial as well.
There was also nothing in the letter that demanded secrecy, so Mazzare had made an appointment with Mike Stearns as soon as he could, which turned out to be late in the evening. He had been kept waiting, Heinzerling with him, patient in the presidential offices. Mike had returned from some official business or other with Don Nasi and, of all people, Harry Lefferts. Neither of the priests could figure out why, after Mazzare had explained what he had been asked to do, both Harry and Mike had snorted with laughter.
“Just keep it quiet, okay?” Mike had said, “We don’t want anyone getting the idea that it’s open season on giving out information to the crowned heads of Europe. And run everything you come up with by Francisco here, he’s in charge of this stuff now.”
Apart from the outburst of laughter, Harry had kept silent, looking thoughtful as Mazzare had explained what Cardinal Barberini wanted. Later the same evening, the young miner-cum-commando had knocked on the rectory door and spent an hour in conversation with Father Mazzare, a conversation that Heinzerling had only vaguely been aware of as muffled voices from downstairs. Heinzerling knew that type, all right. Decent enough on the straight and narrow, well dressed and polite, what the Italians would call an galantuomo. Unleashed or gone bad, nothing but a cold-blooded murderer with a polish of high manners.
The writing-up of three hundred years of theological history was not going to be done overnight, of course. And none of Grantville’s Catholic priests—there were five, now, doing pastoral work, two of them in the chapel at what had been a refugee center, one settling in as the high school’s Catholic chaplain and Latin master beside the two of them at St. Mary’s—had a lot of time to spare. A note went back to the cardinal explaining that the work was in hand amid the pressure of pastoral work and the thing began to take shape.